This
has been an interesting, important and somewhat difficult
book to review. It's not a textbook or guide or manual
about learning how to use Excel in business and there
is little material to help business users make the
transition from competence with Excel to data analysis
and situational modeling with Excel. As the author
writes in the Preface, "This book is written
for experienced Excel users. It doesn't spend much
time on basics and assumes the reader already knows
how Excel works. Most of the chapters in this book
start with a business problem or question, and then
show how Excel can be used in that situation.” And
there are quite a number of problem/solution sets.
The book is interesting and important because author
Gerald Knight uses Excel for tasks that are not often
explained in books.

Knight
starts with a quick introduction to array formulas,
cell addressing and statistical functions. Then
following chapter is about using pivot tables,
an essential element in data analysis with Excel.
With these tools and others he then examines specific
problems and suggested solutions for workload forecasting,
modeling complex situations, statistical process
control, monitoring complex situations, work process
in queues, and optimization using Excel.

Knight
discusses the difficulties presented when importing data
into Excel and some techniques to use when presenting data
and solutions to others. Along the way he develops some
complex and useful Excel files and tools, including a couple
of interesting macros. These completed tools are provided
as files that can be downloaded from the publisher's site.

Knight
uses real data—lots of real data—to generate
useful solutions to real problems. For example, chapter
3 is entitled, “Workload Forecasting”. Knight
uses data which he says is from an actual call center.
The data is the workload for 116 days—five months
of calls in 1998. The goal of the project is, “to
predict a periodic workload that could have an overall
trend, and is subject to short-term ups and downs. The
accuracy of predictions will be measured and used to
set a prediction range with a known probability.” (p.43)
Since this is the first chapter where he develops an
application, he describes in some detail the steps and
includes clear instructions about what to type in which
cells along with the complete macro. The downloadable
files are not locked or protected, so readers can use
the book with the file open in Excel and follow along.
Knight includes several suggestions at the end of the
chapter for improvements, additions and changes that
might make this application more useful in a particular
situation.

Knight
does not go into the cell-by-cell detail in the rest
of the chapters as he does in chapter 3. Since all the
applications he develops are completely open, there is
very little need for that. The macros he writes are fully
commented and do not need to be accompanied by additional
instructions.

As
I read and worked with the book and its files, I kept
thinking there was something missing. Something about
the book and files bothered me. I think the issue for
me is that I want to be involved when I learn and I was
not, at least not initially. Part of the reason for the
lack of involvement is that the applications are presented
complete and useable. I would have liked to see some
of the development steps along the way either illustrated
in the book or in the files. Knight probably feels advanced
Excel users do not need this much support. Some of the
connections between the parts of each application were
less than clear to me in part because of the author's
assumptions. Not only does he assume readers have above
average knowledge of Excel, he also assumes readers have
a solid foundation in statistics and in statistical analysis
of business problems. However, by the third or fourth
time through the same chapter these issues started to
disappear. More and more I was pulled into the examples
and tempted to explore variations.

Author
Gerald Knight writes using vocabulary and assumptions
that not all business users will share. But the book
is for those involved with forecasting and statistics,
for those with piles of data to analyze and who are desperate
for tools to use to take control of this information.
Knight's book provides some very powerful and very useful
applications and methods which will be of great benefit
to the appropriate audience.